while I was working on my English-tp excel files, so they are gone totally. I sent out several copies earlier on and copies of those also circulated, so, if you have one of those, I would really appreciate getting one. Since I am working off my iPad for now and ain't doesn't do excel, a text copy would be especially handy.Thanks.

Speaking of dictionary work, jan Sonja sent me a google docs document, with the suggestion that several people would fill in the blanks. I made a few comments and then the document got moved to the trash-- I made a copy, but haven't published-- there is enough apocrypha already. And since then I haven't heard anything.

Anyhow, "jan sona pi soweli en kasi" for biologist... this seems to be a new pattern:

N pi N en N (The first noun is equally characterized by some relationship with the other two nouns)

maybe from a transformation

N1 N2 en N1 N3 ==> N1 pi N2 en N3

I think elsewhere there is consensus on

N pi M en M (The noun is described by a mixture of both modifiers), e.g. kasi pi laso en loje.

Sonja's post was what got me started and continuing. Her book needs a good job on the trl portion (and maybe less on hieroglyphics and the like, though they boost the percentages easily).The tp 'en' suffers the same ambiguity as English "and" in NPs, only in VPs and DOs is it unambiguously mixture (joi in lb, I think). 'tawa en kama' to go to an fro.

It seems that if, say a cat or a monkey could use toki pona, would they find #1 or #2 easier, or possibly, if anything was smart enough to understand the one, they are smart enough to understand the other.

Erm, do you mean (c*a)@ (c*b)? It depends on what you mean by complexity, each is worse than the other in some ways, simpler in others. But ultimately, I think the first has a slight psychological edge.I don't know what preposition to use after 'kama en tawa' but doubt it is 'lon tan' I would probably go with 'tawa', which works with both verbs.'pilin pi wawa en nasa' or nasa en pilin wawa'.

re: hard drive crashingI've recovered files from most all of my families crashed hard drives. The secret is to use a Knoppix boot disk, mount the failed disk, mount a USB external drive, then copy the data files over. If the machine merely doesn't boot, then the operating system is borked and the data files should be fine. If the drive is physically borked, then usually you can read a large percentage of the files, abeit copy rates will be slow (from the drie attempting to read & reread the sectors). If the surrounding machine is borked, then the drive just needs to be yanked and plugged into another machine. Unless it is an SSD (i.e. the drive is actually a bunch of volatile memory chips), odds are the data is still there.